Marilynne Robinson is a historically-minded writer of
fiction and essays. In one essay
entitled "Family" she decries the damage wrought by the fact that the
"marketplace gods," as she calls them, are now in ultimate charge of
the global economy. The result,
she says, is a return of Social Darwinism—the nineteenth-century idea that
prosperity and success are rewards for the intelligent, the industrious, and
the able, and poverty and failure are equally just rewards for the stupid, the
lazy, and the incompetent. The
Social Darwinism of the 1800s led straight to eugenics, which acquired a bad
reputation after the Nazi regime embraced it during World War II. But in the ruthless international competition
that currently prevails, she sees a return to the bad old days when a small,
fantastically wealthy elite ruled over millions of industrial workers enslaved
in unremitting toil.
So far, so conventional. But toward the end of the essay, she takes an unexpected
turn:
"Maybe the great drag on us all is not the welfare
mother but the incompetent engineer . . . . When our great auto industry nearly
collapsed, an elite of designers and marketing experts were surely to
blame. But the thousands thrown
out of work by their errors were seen as the real problem."
Robinson is good at questioning unspoken assumptions that
most of us are so used to, we don't even realize they are there. The assumption she challenges in this
essay is that global competition is inevitable, and every industrialized nation
must organize its institutions, including its educational system, governmental
policies, and even its cultures and family structures, to succeed in the
constant worldwide race to produce the most goods and services at the lowest
prices. And rather than simply
deploring the way things are, she suggests that the problem may lie in a place
we haven't looked—within the very elites we usually assume are the answer to
the problem.
Robinson is right that the U. S. auto industry went through
a steep decline in the 1980s. The
main reason for that decline was surging competition by Japanese automakers,
who adapted many techniques developed in the U. S. for lean manufacturing and
outran their former teachers. To
the extent that U. S. automotive engineers and managers got lazy and let things
slide, she is absolutely right. It
took another decade for U. S. automakers to learn the hard lessons that
Japanese competition taught them, but by 2000 the global shares of auto sales
by U. S. and Japanese makers were about even. Now that many Japanese firms have U. S. factories, the
problem is not so clean-cut, but that specific incident has been taken care of.
Both Japan and the U. S. now have China to worry about
instead. The effect of the
globalized economy on the U. S. is an erosion of time available for family and
family life. Instead of one person
in a family earning a living wage that suffices for a spouse and children,
Robinson cites the many workers today who "patch together a living out of
two or three part-time jobs, or work overtime as an employer's hedge against
new hiring."
What if Robinson's "incompetent engineers" had
been competent, and had beaten the Japanese at their own game sooner? Because the largest single expense in
manufacturing tends to be labor, if the U. S. makers had quickly adopted the
productivity-raising automation technologies that were such a large factor in
making Japan more competitive, probably the U. S. workers who eventually lost
manufacturing jobs later would have simply lost them sooner. Clearly, what Robinson is calling for is
not just competence in a narrow technical sense, but a larger vision of what
purposes engineers serve, and what forms of life are encouraged or discouraged
by engineering activities.
What would have to change for society to become less dominated
by the ruthlessness of international competition and more hospitable to things
Robinson says she misses:
"humor, pleasure, and charm; courage, dignity, and graciousness;
loyalty, respect, and good faith"?
Engineers tend to think in terms of systems, and when asked
a question about a large system, the engineering answer tends to be framed in
the same terms of system-wide changes.
Some would look toward legal and regulatory solutions: protective tariffs, restrictions on
immigration, widespread unionization, and other changes historically associated
with left-wing politics. But
people are not machines, and the kind of scientific approach that models cows
as spheres for the purpose of analysis, and models entire populations as a
bunch of numbers in a database somewhere, is the kind of thinking that has
gotten us into this situation in the first place.
Besides the direct influence of elites through the powers
they hold, elites also teach by example.
Civic, industry, and government leaders of earlier eras attempted to
maintain public appearances that were consistent with good character and
citizenship—things like charm, courage, dignity, graciousness, loyalty, and
good faith. They sometimes failed
to show these traits of character in private, or occasionally in public, but
the journalists of the day recognized the need to preserve the illusion of
rectitude in many cases and refrained from plastering every famous citizen's
misdeeds all over the countryside.
Scandals were reported, but they were rare enough to be scandalous. By contrast, scandalous behavior in
everything from sexual morality to profiteering appears to be the norm for many
public figures today, at least judging by media coverage.
I don't know clearly how to express what I'm asking
for. Perhaps the essence of it is
a reform of character starting with the individual, and a recognition that all
the regulatory changes in the world will not reform an individual who has no
example of good character and rectitude to look up to and to consider
imitating. If we want an economy
in which family breadwinners are paid a living wage for a work schedule that
leaves enough time to families to be families, and not just strangers sharing
the same living quarters, we all have to value that way of life—have to value
it more than just that additional dollar we use to buy that additional consumer
item. All of us, high and low,
rich and poor, engineers and janitors, will have to undergo a radical change. And then we will have to re-learn the
democratic process of moving our society toward the vision laid out by people
who see it better than most of us do—people like Marilynne Robinson.
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